Narita Town

Today we plan on visiting Narita and then heading to the airport for Hong Kong. We are up so early! We have another icky breakfast buffet, try to read the paper and then get on the bus to the Airport so we can get on the train to Narita. While the hotel has a Narita shuttle, it doesn't go into town until 10am and it is only 7:00...so the airport and train it is!

Narita is all a-hush, still asleep when we arrive. The delivery trucks are dropping off their wares, the street sellers are cooking their treats and most shop doors are locked tight. There is no window shopping as all store fronts have that metal roller-door that comes down to close off the shop.

We have a simple map and find that most roads lead to the temple. We start the trek, a long downward loop. This route is an absolute feast for the eyes and I take many photos, which I will post here when we get to a spot where I can upload them from. There are the tiniest fried shrimp, eels that are still swimming, some things I couldn't recognize, but guessed that I probably wouldn't eat and lots of temple shops where you can buy seemingly thousands of different red and gold trinkets. When we get to the temple I am amazed at the amount of commerce going on in what should be a holy place. Do we do this in the US?

The grounds are huge and we walked all of it, some parts twice. I am finding myself voluntarily climbing stairs, this too is unusual for me!

It seems that almost everyone eats from street vendors, coffee is not a required morning beverage for the locals such as it is for us and so we are having difficulty finding a stopping point. All the sit-down restaurants don't seem to open until 11 am for lunch. We are nearly back to the train when we find a cafe to wile away the hour before lunch. (Hopefully the jet-lag timing thing will correct soon so that our eating times begin to match serving times!)

Our return walk up the hill has all the stores open now and the street vendors very busy. The menus seem to highlight grilled eel. We had the pleasure of watching the process of eel butchering from start to finish....When we did finally stop for lunch, I ordered chicken.

Every restaurant has pictures or the actual dishes as presented with pricing in the windows and we are now able to window shop our away to the top of the hill and the idea was that we would share a favorite and eat there. Instead we ate at the very British pub. They had wine.

After lunch we discovered an internet cafe and touched base with the Hotel. All is well and we head back to the Hotel and on to the Airport again...This time to actually fly!